How to Write Objectives for Child Care Workers' Performance Appraisals

by Linda Ray, Demand Media

Give your child care workers specific objectives to work toward.

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Before you can realistically perform child care workers' performance appraisals, you must imbue employees with specific objectives you expect them to meet. While a pleasing personality, proper background and education and skill with construction paper may be qualifications you expect from employees, how they employ those skills is more relevant to evaluations.

Step 1

Define your child care center goals and objectives for yourself. It's difficult to provide employees with objectives if you aren't clear about them yourself. Consider goals such as expanding enrollment through referrals, providing an accident-free environment for the children or developing interesting and educational activities for your charges.

Step 2

Choose those goals that most closely affect your workers and reword them so they become personal objectives for employees to achieve. For example, a worker should aim to allow no accidents or injuries during her shift. You may ask workers to present at least one or two new activities a month. Give workers referral cards they can pass out to the parents when they pick up their children.

Clarify the objectives when you hire new workers and let them know the areas on which you will grade their performance. Be specific and keep accurate records so that you'll have the data when it comes time for performance reviews.

Step 4

Provide a means of advancement for workers who consistently achieve positive reviews. Whether you plan to open new child care centers and hope to promote a manager from your current staff or base raises on the evaluations, provide employees with positive incentives as you write the objectives.

Step 5

Prepare review sheets in advance so that you can refer to the objectives you provided the workers. Fill in the performance of each worker based on the objectives. Develop a number system or a designation such as fair, good, excellent or poor.

Things Needed

Goals

Performance evaluation sheets

Tip

Provide room for feedback so the appraisal can stimulate communication. Offer workers the opportunity to list their own objectives during the review. Perhaps workers feel they need additional training or they don’t clearly understand the objectives.

Warning

Avoid conflicts during the appraisal process by starting out the meeting on a positive note. Note the accomplishments you've noticed since the last review and compliment the child care worker for his efforts in meeting his objectives, especially if you have negative information to follow up with.

About the Author

Linda Ray is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years reporting experience. She's covered business for newspapers and magazines, including the "Greenville News," "Success Magazine" and "American City Business Journals." Ray holds a journalism degree and teaches writing, career development and an FDIC course called "Money Smart."

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